#americanplays

#TBT THE BATTLE PLAYS TRILOGY (or, 'THE BATTLE PLAYS OF THE REPUBLIC') was the first official #adhoceconomy project premiering a dozen-years ago this month. The three-year / three-part performance installation examined the isolation of the American-psyche-in-crisis through genre, medium, and history. BRING ME THE HEAD OF JOHN FORD, or GOOD BAD UGLY CRAZY (2008, The Brick Theater – Brooklyn) mixed elements of Noh and Greek mystery plays with 4 projector screens and 2 televisions against one speed-addicted video store clerk in a synchronized-riff edit of a classic Spaghetti Western, into which he projects all of his innermost desires and memories in an obsessive ritual set in a trailer park in West, Texas. ANTIGONE WITH THE WIND (2009, Monkey Town – Brooklyn) combined a surround-sound audio book recording of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel with densely-layered environmental compositions, 70’s femme-disco pop, and a chorus of barking dogs, all as a backdrop for an intricately rehearsed cope-mechanism work-out exercise performed by a little girl locked in a basement by an unknown abductor in suburban Atlanta. MY KIND OF BLOOD (2010, Brooklyn Fire Proof in association with Bushwick Open Studios) took a seminal 50’s Miles Davis Jazz album and re-constructed it with police scanner radio, german burlesque, street crime photos, and hard-boiled pulp to reveal a private eye’s pattern-guide work fetish as he unravels a violent noir-crime mystery in a gritty Brooklyn brownstone apartment. Conceived and developed by Darcie Champagne, Ryan Dorin, Anne Dyas, Michael Mason, Adam Laten Willson, Karl Newman, Casey Wimpee, and Cole Wimpee Contributions from Isaac Byrne, Ishaq Clayton, Jared Culverhouse, Amanda Hamilton, and Amy Lynn Stewart. NEWYORKISDEAD.NET

She played the lead in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer play "Anna Christie" https://americanliterature.com/author/eugene-oneill/play/anna-christie/summary

Miss Lulu Bett is a housemaid for her sister's family, unhappy until she falls in love with her brother-in-law, Ninian. They 'accidentally' get married. https://americanliterature.com/author/zona-gale/play/miss-lulu-bett-play/summary

Wednesday 18th May Q&A with the Cast and Director

Please join us for a post-show question and answer session with our fantastic cast and director John Haidar. Free to all audience members with a ticket to the show on the 18th May.

Tuesday 24th May The Vietnam War: On Stage and Screen

We will be joined by the celebrated film producer and long-time collaborator of Stanley Kubrick, Jan Harlan (The Shining; Full Metal Jacket; Eyes Wide Shut), along with Kevin Ruane, Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University, one of the UK’s leading experts on the Vietnam War. The talkback will be chaired by the director of Last of the Boys, John Haidar. Free to all audience members with a ticket to the show on the 24th May.

Before shooting began on Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola explained that, ‘though it won’t necessarily be political – it will be about war and the human soul [...] it will be frightening, horrible – with even more violence than The Godfather.’ Ever since the final mass exodus from South East Asia in 1975 – and even during it, in the case of The Green Berets (1968), starring John Wayne – American involvement in Vietnam has been the focus of many of the twentieth century’s most towering achievements in cinema, with The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), First Blood (1982), Platoon (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Forrest Gump (1994) amongst the most celebrated with 19 Academy Award wins between them. Representations of the war and its enduring aftermath on stage are less frequent, with only a handful of works in comparison, including Tennessee Williams little-known one-act play, Green Eyes (1970), Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (1978), John DiFusco’s Tracers (1984), and Bruce Norris’s Purple Heart (2002).